Posts Tagged Roadsigns

I’ve tweeted about this a couple of times previously, but thought I’d take the opportunity of the longer form to expand and expound on the subject.

Take a look at the photo below. It’s the sign for a roundabout that’s at the junction of the Argyle Rd and Ruislip Rd East in Ealing.

The roundabout was built about 18 months ago, and the sign put up around about the same time. It is, as I’m sure you’ve spotted if you’re at all familiar with The Highway Code, wrong – it’s directing drivers to negotiate the junction in an anti-clockwise direction, as you would if we drove on the right-hand side of the road, as opposed to a traditional (some would say old-fashioned) clock-wise traversal that we know and love as left-hand drivers.

The thing that annoys me (or should I say disappoints me) about this sign is that someone must have designed it, someone must have made it, someone must have quality checked it, and someone must have erected it, but at each stage no-one noticed that it was wrong, or they did notice and did nothing about it.

Either way, through ignorance, apathy or plain old carelessness, there is a sign on a very busy road in Ealing which thousands of people drive past every day which is inexcusably incorrect.

I’m embarrassed every time I go past it, because it makes Ealing, and by extension the residents of Ealing, look dumb. You may say it’s just a road-sign, and there are bigger, more important things to worry about, and you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to the small stuff. On such broken windows do cities crumble…